Mining: Reducing tedium and strain

[Enko]

As a returning player I've been interested in quite a few systems but one thing that essentially is virtually unchanged: the mining process.

Freelancers mining was never meant to be done at scale and I think it shows, most people tend to agree that you can do like 15 minutes or so of mining at a time, and it's not really a good scale career choice because it requires a group of players to make optimal but most people prefer solo trading.

What I suggest is the following:

Use FLHook to alter the way mining zones work, specific ships like asteroid miner, drone or whatever small list of suitable ships can go into the zone and go stationary.

The ship then types a command like /mine - and the mining begins. This process then perhaps does something fancy if possible, but if not it works similar to the jumpdrive where it gives you progress feedback in the log and then delivers cargo into the ship every so often (or the mining pod if such is targeted instead). This would be tuned to be on par with normal mining rates and could even be lowered some for balance/reduced server strain.

To combat afk mining you could also do something where you are required to move the vessel a certain distance around in the mining zone from where you created the command, or create multiple zones in a small area that get depleted and respawn quickly, quick enough so 2-3 mining ops can exist at a location but slow enough that it is better to move than to not.

Overall when I was trying to ask players for help creating a mining op to try it out, most players said they just would only be the transport because they hate the mining aspect. I tend to agree its tedious, strains the hand and does not respect the player if you're seeking to do this long term.

The other bonus of this is to simply lean more into PoB use as basically this all ties into PoB more, and would make the use of them and mining as an option far more healthy.

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